In this episode, host Rick Watson talks with:

Shailesh Kumar, SVP of Engineering at Salesforce, is the Head of Engineering for Salesforce Commerce & Retail Cloud. He previously served as SVP and Head of Engineering at ClickUp and VP of Engineering at MuleSoft, both of which were acquired by Salesforce.

This episode can be seen as an AI primer that will benefit those who listen to this wide-ranging discussion.

Shailesh discusses the opportunity that the model context protocol (MCP) provides developers and, in the future, non-developers. Salesforce currently has a pilot within Commerce Cloud to determine how customers use agents and what agents consumers want to build, alongside vendors.

Shailesh also discusses how software development will evolve as more tools and agents democratize the creation of software. The difference between public large language models and custom-built large language models.

Shailesh distinguishes between deterministic output and non-deterministic flow, which has existed in software engineering and the risks it poses to businesses. He also describes AgentForce, which Salesforce offers partners to develop agents on, and provides pre-built agents to Salesforce customers.

Agentic commerce is unknown, and Shailesh believes that giving partners and merchants the tools will show the future of agentic commerce. He also discusses how agents and platforms can interact with stitching and have guardrails around them to enable merchants to deliver joy to consumers.

The end of silos as agents interact with many different data sources inside businesses, and the speed of development and innovation.